I mostly read Exodus because I’m a completist—it was bugging me that I’d read the first two books of this trilogy about, as the back cover puts it, “the two preposterous philosophical anti-heroes,” Lars and W., but hadn’t read the third. This third book is more of the same, which is mostly a good thing, because these books are funny: Lars and W. are philosophy professors who drink a lot of gin and bemoan the state of the world in general and academia in particular. In this volume, W. is on the verge of losing his job but then doesn’t, because of some technicality, but now he “only teaches sports science” students (14). In the last book, Lars and W. attempted a US lecture tour; in this one, it’s their “great lecture tour of Great Britain,” their “last look at the ruins of the humanities,” their investigation of the “destruction of philosophy at [W.’s] university — of the destruction of philosophy in Britain — of the destruction of philosophy in the whole world” (3). But we don’t really see much of the lecturing: it’s more the touring, the in-between places, the train rides and the coffees and beers before or after lecturing. And as with the previous two books, a lot of this one consists of Lars recounting his conversations with W., full of funny insults. There’s this:
I was a scholarly Kasper Hauser, W. says, who knew nothing of reading, or note-taking. I could read, that much is true. But only just, only approximately, and with a great deal of pathos, with wild underlinings and illegitimate identifications. — ‘You thought every book you read was about you, didn’t you?’ That’s me!, I would say, pointing to a passage in Hegel. It’s about me!, I would say, pointing to the Science of Logic. (8)
And this: “He can see my lips moving as I read, W. says. It’s not a good sign in a scholar” (29). And this: “I rely on secondary commentaries, on idiot’s guides, W. says. In the end, I am only a ransacker of books, a kind of reader-marauder. My reading is a great pillaging, as if by a Viking raiding party” (ibid.)
W and Lars’s wanderings intertwine with the themes of exile that keep recurring in this book (at least one lecture they give is about “exilic themes in the work of Marx”), and one of the pair’s central concerns is the place of thought in the modern world/in a capitalistic society/in capitalistic Great Britain in particular. I’m sure I missed a bunch of philosophical jokes and references—I suspect someone who majored in philosophy would find this book even funnier than I did—but still, this was a satisfying read.
Leave a Reply